October 13, 2026
THREE RED STATES have launched a broadside against laws in Massachusetts and two other states that protect providers of abortions.
The attorneys general in Louisiana, Arkansas, and Alabama filed a lawsuit at the end of September against California, Massachusetts, and New York. The suit asks the US Supreme Court to strike down the “shield laws” allowing providers in the three blue states to send abortion medication to people in states with stricter abortion laws.
There are two lawsuits taking aim at the shield laws. One is filed against individual providers, including the Massachusetts Medication Abortion Access Project, and one is targeting the states themselves.
The “extremity” of the inter-state clash was expected, said Boston University law professor Nicole Huberfeld on The Codcast. Huberfeld is chair of the BU Health Law Program and co-director of the BU Program on Reproductive Justice.
“The fact that the states have drifted so far apart in their positions and are so willing to make it part of their political theater and culture wars — maybe that part of it wasn’t quite as predictable,” she said, “but the high degree of conflict and its intractability was entirely predictable.”
Shield laws, Huberfeld noted, are a relatively new creation. After the US Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade in June 2022, Gov. Charlie Baker issued an executive order prohibiting executive branch cooperation with out-of-state investigations targeting lawful abortions in Massachusetts.
The Legislature codified the order into law that fall, and Gov. Maura Healey signed an updated shield law in 2025 expanding protections. Massachusetts’ challenged law not only prevents cooperation with other states looking to discipline Bay State providers, it also limits the release of sensitive data, allows prescription labels to display a practice name instead of an individual physician’s name, and codifies a state requirement for abortion care to be provided in emergencies when medically necessary.
States with strict abortion laws have been trying to enforce their laws against providers in other states. It’s thrust the country into the messy legal question of whether the reproductive care services are being provided where the patient is — which may be a state with a ban — or where the abortion medication is issued.
“I wish I didn’t have to make this analogy, but I have researched it and it’s the best I can come up with,” Huberfeld said. “This is a lot like the way state laws looked before the Civil War, where slavery was either legal or banned, and there was litigation over this question of who could reach into the borders of other states over trying to, for example, retrieve enslaved people back to the place where they had been enslaved.”
The US Supreme Court may take up the question directly or allow it to play out in the lower courts first, Huberfeld said, but the nation’s highest court will likely be faced with this high-stakes jurisdictional puzzle.
“There is no clear answer as to what happens when states refuse to cooperate,” she said, “and in fact have laws that are not only incontrovertibly but irreconcilably in conflict with one another.”
On the episode, Huberfeld discusses the history of shield laws (3:00), the messy nationwide legal landscape (14:00), and the main arguments in the case filed with the US Supreme Court (22:00).
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
